For the past thirty years it has been fashionable to hire someone to research and write about one's family history. It isn't a completely new phenomena. Long established aristocratic families have kept family chronicles for centuries, others keep and update family trees etc. However, the trend has spread to the middle classes and the nouveau riche. The demand from these groups has made family histories a far more difficult and so specialised art. Their ancestors often led obscure or picaresque lives, few records were kept and the researchers have to diligently search out the truth. The histories are sometimes just commissioned for private interest but sometimes the historians write books which their clients then vanity publish. Such accounts rarely sell much but are popular with the lazier newsheets who can serialise them. Occasionally accounts of more colourful families can become big sellers. For example, those of Stayson Dorlac, the workshop owner, whose family escapades, in particular a Guards-dodging great uncle, turned Dorlac from an anonymous businessman into a prominent local figure. Surprisingly, a lot of emphasis is placed on uncovering the exact truth and not embellishing or censoring it. The local culture doesn't stigmatise someone on the basis of what their family got up to, providing it wasn't too revolting and is sufficiently distant. Indeed, the more humble the origins of a wealthy person are, the more they are admired for having risen above them. The pioneering family historian was Piers Chorlan, who began his trade forty years ago. Chorlan, employed mainly by lawyers, travelled around Christoté and beyond, trying to unearth any facts he could about people's descendants, visiting cemeteries, reading electoral rolls, listen to local stories etc. Some of his histories, e.g. those of the Aabac family, have become minor classics; he worked (so he claimed) strictly from facts but was about to flesh the details out into vivid pictures of the past. Chorlan's offices, originally on Lasklo Street, moved to Dorlaf Avenue when his business expanded. He died in 1308 during the course of his research (albeit prosaically; he caught pneumonia on a cold road to Dydesbury) but his company is still flourishing.